Thanksgiving

Bumped from a few weeks ago, more appropriate for today, Canadian Thanksgiving:

Irish ancestors, 180 years ago--the 1840s.

It happened as he was on his way to Jerusalem, that he was passing along the borders of Samaria and Galilee. As he entered into a certain village, ten men who were lepers met him, who stood at a distance. They lifted up their voices, saying, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!" When he saw them, he said to them, "Go and show yourselves to the priests." It happened that as they went, they were cleansed. One of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, glorifying God with a loud voice. He fell on his face at Jesus' feet, giving him thanks; and he was a Samaritan. Jesus answered, "Weren't the ten cleansed? But where are the nine? Were there none found who returned to give glory to God, except this stranger?" Then he said to him, "Get up, and go your way. Your faith has healed you." -- Luke 17: 11-19.

It is worth remembering that a lot of things have gotten better in the world.

When I was young, Ireland was dirt poor. Ireland had always been dirt poor. All of Southern Europe was dirt poor. Even Scandinavia was poor. Mass starvation was more or less normal in India, Africa, or China. We were told the world was running out of food. It was only going to get a lot worse. My high school biology teacher had us all buy and read "The Population Bomb."

Famines are now increasingly rare: there has been a “green revolution.” India has been exporting food for some time; that would have been unthinkable then. Ditto China, Thailand. The possibilities of GMO suggest still greater abundance is coming soon. Returning to Toronto after 25 years, it seems to me that, while the prices of some things have risen astronomically, the cost of food is not that different. We are evidently getting more efficient at agriculture, even in the developed world.

Did I mention the variety of food? In youth, it was pretty limited. In my home town, there were only two kinds of restaurants: short order, and Chinese. Chinese being really only a few vaguely Cantonese dishes. Even twenty-five years ago, a Vietnamese or Ethiopian restaurant in Toronto was an exotic novelty.

Now all the necessary ingredients are on our supermarket shelves.

When I was young, a third of the world was behind the “iron curtain,” poor, unfree, and out of cultural contact. A civilization-ending nuclear war seemed possible at any second. Families built bomb shelters in their back yards. I remember the air raid system being tested. That entire complex of terrors evaporated in about 1990, as if it had all been a dream—something almost nobody had imagined a few years earlier. Poland, Latvia, Bulgaria—members of NATO and the EU. I still can't get used to it.

When I was young, democracy was rare all over. Even in Europe, Spain, Portugal, and Greece were dictatorships. So was practically all of Latin America and East Asia. If there were opposition movements, they were no better--Stalinist or Maoist insurgencies. Now most of these countries are democracies, and the high tide of liberty seems to keep rising. We more or less assume now that it will eventually triumph everywhere.

Even a decade ago, we were supposed to be running out of oil. Soon all the lights would go out, and we would huddle in the dark to wait for death. Tankerloads of cash were being shipped annually to dubious governments and zombie economies mostly in the Middle East, much of it probably ultimately funding terrorism. And the Middle East did not seem a promising place to hold the mortgage to our future.

Now the US is the world’s largest oil exporter. Followed by Canada, with Australia, Brazil, and others coming on stream, the fracking revolution barely begun elsewhere.

A lot of strategic headaches are hereby gone. If Iran were now to try to shut the Straits of Hormuz, that old worry, the main loser would be Iran itself. Anti-American Venezuela is in economic freefall. Putin cannot count on the continuing flow of cash to fund his military adventurism.

During the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis, circa 1980, Red Buttons did an over-the-top patriotic turn on American TV insisting that good old American ingenuity would someday solve the oil crisis. It looked then like faintly pathetic jingoism, wishful thinking; and it turned out to be dead right.

In real terms, we are all clearly growing wealthier. You may not notice, if you have been here all along. I see it, having been away for some years. Leave aside the price of housing, a special problem. Aside from food, I note that the price of cheap manufactured items, those many little things you need around the house, is lower. I do not need to count the cost as my parents did before buying a toaster. Improved technology, improved transportation, globalization—a lot of things are now made more cheaply in China, or India, or Southeast Asia. This should continue for some time, as new areas open up to industrialization, and by the time we have industrialized the world, robotics may be even cheaper.

Riding the bus today—and may I say, buses and streetcars too are much more comfortable than they were in my childhood—I overheard a kid talking about her school’s recent trip to Costa Rica.

Costa Rica. When we had school trips, it was Toronto or Quebec City. My grandparents’ idea of a big vacation was to get in the car and drive as far as Virginia. If you made it across an ocean, you had made it, full stop.

The internet has improved our lives immeasurably. They had radio and black and white movies and a phonograph; later black and white TV, with three bland channels to choose from. Our entertainment options now, by comparison, seem almost limitless. And it is all on demand; if we feel like a nature documentary tonight, we can watch a nature documentary. On pelicans, if we prefer.

The significance of this to education, and to getting educated, we are only beginning to exploit. Now, whenever I need to know anything, instead of rummaging through libraries, perhaps even having to take an advanced degree, I can Google it up instantly. More often than not, there will be not only raw information, but an instructional video—all free. Not to mention any book now out of copyright, the precious cargo of a dozen widely dispersed university libraries—all free. Delightfully, you can now search automatically through all the academic journals in a field. All the knowledge you used to get from an expensive early adulthood away from home is now free instantly from your bedroom at any age.

Communications? I used to dream of using the Teletype machine in the hotel where I worked to send a message to our hotel in Rome. Imagine! But I did not know the protocols; use was expensive, and carefully restricted. It blew my mind the first time I was able to send an email to someone in Tokyo--it was a guy at the Swedish Embassy. I wrote just for the sake of being able to; actually, I think it was Usenet rather than email back then. Now I can remain in instant contact with friends everywhere, wherever I travel.

When we were young, we were terrified of phoning long distance. The expense! I read a prediction by Arthur C. Clarke that one day, we would each carry a phone wherever we went, and would be able to use it to talk to anyone in the world. That was then extreme science fiction.

Now I can instantly phone anyone in Canada on my cell phone, or anyone in the world through Skype and the Internet, free. And see them too. I can read or watch the news from any given city. I can even publish directly anything I choose to, text or image or video, free. As here. We once got the news from newsreels at the movie theatre; the first live telecast by satellite from Europe was a big thrill. I remember it was of the Pope from the Vatican. Now, if anything happens anywhere, someone has a cell phone and is recording it, It is quickly up online.

Smart phones have put the world in our pockets. Consider only the increased safety: lost? GPS.  Need a ride? Call from the curb. Fallen on a mountain hike and broken a leg? Call emergency rescue. Calculator, map, flashlight, translator, camera, video camera, always in your pocket. In China, you make payments with your phone. In North America, debit cards serve; it was not long ago that I had to go to the bank weekly, stand in line, and withdraw the amount I thought I would need for the next seven days. Damned inconvenient, when everyone else in town was doing the same each payday.

My kids cannot get interested in any toys or games or sports equipment we buy them; they sit in a pile still wrapped, in the boxes, and we have learned to stop adding more. There is too much entertainment of all kinds on the Internet, free. We complain about lack of activity, but really, the bottom line is that they have infinitely more options than we did. We were often bored. And so long as they can afford a tablet and an internet connection, all this is equally available to poor kids.

The Internet is also rapidly reducing the cost of many services. Uber makes transportation cheaper; AirBnB makes travel to some new city cheaper. It has become dead easy and convenient to find a dentist, a plumber, or any other given service as needed.

Tablets have vastly improved my own life. My daughter came to refer to my first ebook reader as “Daddy’s toy.” Big enough to read on, small enough to curl up with, I am inseparable now from one tablet or another. So are the wife and kids.

When I was a kid, we still had the March of Dimes and Easter Seals, fighting for a cure for tuberculosis and polio. All gone, and for the best of reasons. Those fights have been own.

We kids then all suffered through measles red and German, mumps, chicken pox, whooping cough, maybe three or four less common afflictions. Track back a couple of generations, and add in smallpox, scarlet fever, and so on. All gone.

It is rather common suddenly for people to live into their nineties. My grandfather died at 61. George Washington made it to 67. And it may be uncool to mention it, but is how much better have many retirement years become since Viagra? In the nineties, everyone was terrified of AIDS: a rapidly expanding plague, and a death sentence. Now we hardly hear of AIDS; instead, of people “living with HIV.”

Despite the eternal voices of doom, the truth is that in material terms, life has been getting better for more and more people since the awful disruptions of the earlier 20th century, and leaving aside those awful disruptions, probably for the past 200 years.

We used to know this; we used to believe in inevitable human progress. The horrors of World War and Nazism and the Russian Revolution shook our faith out of us; but it was never really misplaced.

But those horrors too, Nazism and Bolshevism and other such ideologies based on scientism, also warn us. As life gets easier in material terms, we tend to forget the spiritual values: humanity, morality, reverence, and that ancient sacrifice, an humble and a contrite heart. In the end, we need them more than any material things. And suffer more from their lack.

Lord God of hosts, be with us yet--
Lest we forget. Lest we forget.

It is needful at times to pause and give thanks.